Stories set in the Culture in which Things Went Wrong tended to start with humans losing or forgetting or deliberately leaving behind their terminal. It was a conventional opening, the equivalent of straying off the path in the wild woods in one age, or a car breaking down at night on a lonely road in another.

Soon equates to good, later to worse, Uagen Zlepe, scholar. Therefore, immediacy.

I just come up with the stories and write them as well as I can. There's not really a great deal of strokey-beard thinking going on.

A lot of what the 'Culture' is about is a reaction to all the science fiction I was reading in my very early teens.

Any theory which causes solipsism to seem just as likely an explanation for the phenomena it seeks to describe ought to be held in the utmost suspicion.

I still find it hard to understand that anyone could argue that you can't have machines that exhibit consciousness.

Truth, I have learned, differs for everybody. Just as no two people ever see a rainbow in exactly the same place - and yet both most certainly see it, while the person seemingly standing right underneath it does not see it at all - so truth is a question of where one stands, and the direction one is looking in at the time.